Well the excitement never ceases. I reconed the 421, left the screens in, taped up the back vent, and measured it using WT3 with the speaker laying on its back.

Ugh.

QTS measured 0.75. I let it run in for a while with low frequency signals. Got worse. I called Speaker Exchange where I got the recone kit: they never measure driver Q so they don't know if it is normal or not.

Inspiration. I propped up the speaker vertically. Bingo (kind of). QTS measures around 0.4. Seems like the new suspension is very limber and maybe, the coil was out of the gap in the when the speaker was lying on its back. Does this make sense? VAS was around 30, but that was measured in a box with the speaker facing down.

Any wisdom out there?